FAQ writer here. I've got a video with demos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38rf9FLhl-8&t=105s from a few years ago. AMA.

BTW I'm fairly sure I wrote the siteswap -> on-screen simulation, in 1988. In Pascal. A few years later three of us wrote http://www.juggling.org/programs/java/MAGNUS/juggler.html in now-ancient Java, which did a ton more stuff.

Taught myself to juggle grocery store bags while working at a grocery store.

It's a little like spinning plates. You hang a bag in the air, leave it for a bit, and grab it before it hits the ground. Now interleave 3 of these:

Start:

- Hang bag A with right hand.

- Hang bag B with left hand.

- Hang bag C with right hand and grab bag A with left hand.

Process:

- Hang bag A with left hand and grab bag B with right hand.

- Hang bag B with right hand and grab bag C with left hand.

- Hang bag C with left hand and grab bag A with right hand.

- Hang bag A with right hand and grab bag B with left hand.

- Hang bag B with left hand and grab bag C with right hand.

- Hang bag C with right hand and grab bag A with left hand.

End:

- Grab bag B with right hand.

- Grab bag C with left hand, while still holding bag A.

OR

- Allow all bags to fall on floor, then collect them.

Here is an entertaining video describing the same notation from Colin Wright. Excellent speaker!

https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0

Hey, maybe we'll get one of the originators on here?

One interesting thing that happened when jugglers discovered siteswap was a proliferation in new patterns as they discovered the full space of (hand position independent) patterns. Some are more difficult to time/think than they are to throw/catch.

For more history see the wiki... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap

> Hey, maybe we'll get one of the originators on here?

Hello

The Juggler3D "screensaver" https://linux.die.net/man/6/juggler3d can also be run manually with a pattern, and it will attempt to show a stick figure juggling with that pattern.

I first saw this through xscreensaver and was very impressed. At least as it's packaged for Arch, xscreensaver brings in loads of weird, fun, mind-expanding screensavers. It's always a surprise. I'm not sure if other distributions' packages pull in the full set of screensavers by default, but I imagine you can find them regardless.

I hadn't seen this in OpenGL... it's nice to see some good open source simulators. I do remember a much older (than 2009 or even 2002) version called Juggle that ran on HPUX, but it may have been written in pascal and it certainly didn't render the man.

And my brother uses Juggling Lab to look at the simulations.

Hi wrote this article in a blog explaining the basics if you are interested http://www.mathisintheair.com/eng/2018/02/21/maths-and-juggl...

Thanks! That was very informative.

For more on site swap, read also B. Polster: The Mathematics of Juggling. Springer, 2002. (https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Juggling-Polster-Burkard-...) and here is a review by @allenknutson (writer of the FAQ): https://www.ams.org/notices/200401/rev-knutson.pdf

This website is unchanged from 1993 (the web archive first crawled it in 1997), yet it looks great in my 4K screen. I wouldn't be able to tell if it was written yesterday or 20 years ago. Completely unlike the experience you are getting from something like this http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...

It doesn't look great on my screen and I need to turn on reader-mode (which breaks the graphs) or zoom and scroll horizontally in order to read the content

Might be fine on a desktop but the ASCII art is illegibly small on my phone screen.

Anthony Gatto, the greatest juggler alive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609254

Is there an intersection between HNers and jugglers? I've been teaching myself contact juggling for... quite some time. I picked it because it was so far out of my comfort zone.

I spent hours a day juggling for ~4 years in my mid teens (in my 30s now) and got up to juggling 8 balls.

I find numbers juggling (say 5 or more) to be almost therapeutic. It requires a reasonable amount of physical exertion, and it just pulls you into a flow state. All of your mental and physical focus is concentrated on maintaining this ephemeral pattern, and there's no room for anything else... until the pattern falls apart :-)

Probably. When I lived in the bay area, I juggled at the San Francisco circus center: http://circuscenter.org/juggling and there's also a juggling club in Berkeley: https://berkeleyjuggling.org/ Many jugglers I've met there worked in IT/software-related jobs.

There’s at least a few developers that juggle. I’m one.

I like the finite state machine (directed graph) near the end. That means there’s a regular expression that can encode it.

You might like some of the papers about random traversals of this graph, e.g. http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0302.5257 and http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1601.06391

Do any online tools to validate and visualise siteswap notation exist?

You just need your head :) Check http://www.siteswap.org/validate.html Otherwise, check the software section here: http://www.siteswap.org/